


just to point the way

by endquestionmark



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-11
Updated: 2015-05-11
Packaged: 2018-03-30 00:34:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3916537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Please,” Matt says, and the tension is back in his shoulders. He flexes his fingers, closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, and none of it helps. “It’s just been a bad day, and I — I don’t know, Claire — I just.” He tries to find words, and fails, and says instead, far more brusquely than he would like: “I need something to do. Just something simple, anything, but you have to tell me.”</p><p>“Like what?” Claire says. “Do my backlog of dishes? Get all the laundry off that one chair in my room? Hang up my scrubs?” She sounds more confused than incredulous now. “I know your thing is being cryptic, but this is taking that to a whole new level.” Her heartbeat is picking up a little, though, so she has to be picking up on what he’s asking for, at least a little, and Matt shrugs.</p><p>“I was hoping for something a little more authoritative,” he admits, voice dropping.</p>
            </blockquote>





	just to point the way

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this prompt.](https://daredevilkink.dreamwidth.org/725.html?thread=814805#cmt814805) If you were in a cafe with me at any point today, this is what I was thinking about when I was staring at the wall, and also when I was drinking coffee, and also when I was studiedly not looking at you! The more you know.

It’s not that Matt isn’t busy — the weather’s getting warmer, no more April showers that set in for the night as the sun goes down, and that’s happening later too; Karen’s remarked on some glorious Hell’s Kitchen sunsets, even from their office’s window — because there’s always an uptick in crime rates with the changing seasons, when people stop being so guarded and tempers flare up and debts come due. Matt’s coming into the office later than usual, taking the extra hours to sleep through the early sunrise, as are Foggy and Karen, and he’s started patrolling later as well. The longer day seems to push crime’s schedule back, so Matt works later and doesn’t start shadowing the rooftops until nine or ten at night.

It’s been humid, too, and while Matt doesn’t precisely miss the severe lacerations he was sustaining on a weekly basis in his old, impromptu costume, the new one doesn’t exactly lend itself to breathability. He feels like a live wire, throwing sparks off in all directions; he picks up information on a possible trafficking organization operating out of Port Authority but based a few blocks over and intervenes in a mugging. It’s only when he’s contemplating picking a fight with the would-be assailants — a group of young men, reeking of entitlement and testosterone, though that last part might be body spray — that Matt catches the claws slipping out, so to speak, and cracks his neck to the side.

He could still pick a fight. It would probably be satisfying, and it certainly wouldn’t be undeserved. The men will probably go on to another bar, more posturing and peacocking, and find some other way to flex their muscles by the time they stumble back to their offices or dorms, whether it’s relatively innocuous property destruction or something far worse. Matt thinks that he could probably justify a bruised rib or two to himself if he tried, and that it wouldn’t keep him up at night even if he didn’t do the moral heavy lifting. They’re quiet now, the young men, but the longer he thinks — their victim is long gone, in a clatter of heels and a rabbit-racing heartbeat — the more likely it is that they’ll try to do something brave.

Claire, Matt thinks suddenly. He couldn’t justify himself to Claire, even if she had voiced qualms about saving Vladimir and taken some ruthless satisfaction in his agony. No harm done, which is the best sort of justice, which is when one of the men — boys, really — comes swinging at Matt, with a broken bottle that whistles as it comes at him, and Matt catches him by the wrist and finishes the arc of his hand against the wall. There’s a crunch; some of it is glass, resonant and chiming, and some of it is bone, muffled and almost soft, and the boy screams, which is what people tend to do when they have to cope simultaneously with broken fingers and embedded pieces of broken glass.

The rest of the boys stand frozen for a moment, and then they scramble to get away, another ten feet down the alley before they remember their friend, and Matt lets go of his wrist and shoves him to stumble in their direction. He almost wants to advise them — he shouldn’t have let the situation get that far, should have defused it before it became a serious confrontation — but they’re bluff and brash and probably won’t think twice about getting a six-pack and stumbling into the emergency room at Metro General with it, making a nuisance of themselves and taking up more room than they need. He can’t quite put the sour-sweat smell of the girl’s panic out of his head, either, and he shifts his weight a little in reflexive rage. It’s enough to send them running, back to the better-lit cross-streets, and Matt brushes the glass dust from his gloves and gets a running start, pushing off the wall to catch a fire escape ladder and make his way up to the roof.

The air is clearer up here, at least. There’s more of a breeze, and Matt wants to push his cowl back and savor it properly, but this is New York. Someone’s always awake, and odds are they’re bored and want to know what’s going on three rooftops over. He flexes his fingers, rolls his shoulders to stretch some of the tension away, and feels a little more settled into himself.

Claire should be back in town by now. It’s not a thought that he has regularly anymore; for a week or two it had been almost constantly present in the forefront of his mind, and he’d pushed through it to focus — at work, on patrol — but it had faded to a faint hum, and reminding himself of it now is, briefly, overwhelming. It’s like freerunning on rooftops he doesn’t know, too quickly to get a clear picture of his surroundings and relying on his instincts and reflexes to save him from sudden obstacles and even more sudden drops. Thinking of Claire carries the same vastness of potential, and that’s why Matt doesn’t do it: it isn’t fair to her, to what she’d said to him and to how she feels, and so he puts it away and doesn’t wonder.

Now, though, he turns it over in his mind. She had sounded sad, that last time, in the morning, but light on her feet. Matt thinks he knows that feeling of incisive wistfulness. He’s been there — known that he’s doing the right thing, and wished it hadn’t hurt as much as it had — and he knows that it isn’t straightforward, and it’s certainly never simple. This, though, is something that he thinks he could be afraid of: the uncertainty of it, the tense fragile hope, these are better and worse than anything he’s faced in the darkness; and so he does what he’s always done, fidgeting still with banked fury, and faces them head-on, faces the drop, and throws himself to the wind, trusting it to catch him.

Claire has a pot of thyme on her fire escape, and not the farmer’s-market garden variety, but something wilder and stronger and slightly astringent. It’s new, and Matt nearly nudges it to an untimely death, but he snags the edge of the pot just in time and resettles it more securely. It’s a quiet noise, but Claire’s a light sleeper even when she’s exhausted; he remembers this with a sensation akin to that of a broken rib, helpless and hollow, which persists even when he hears the rhythm of her quiet footsteps inside.

It’s soothing, having another rhythm to listen to besides the overloud and overemphatic pace of his own body, and he finds himself falling into pace with her before she pulls the curtain back, the sound of her heart suddenly clearer, and slides the window up. There’s a silence; her breath catches for a second, and then she sighs. “You had better be dying,” she says.

Matt holds out his hands, apology and denial, and shrugs. He tries on a smile, crooked and untrue, and says, “Not really, but that could be arranged.”

“Don’t you dare,” Claire says. “Last time I saw you, you had — oh, I don’t know — a couple of broken bones, at least two of which are middle ribs, which, by the way, are absolutely not knitted yet. Remember that time your lung partially collapsed and you only survived because I stabbed you very precisely in the chest? Which was really satisfying, by the way, but gets kind of old the third or fourth time, but you’re not going to have to worry about that, because when your broken rib punctures your lung and you sustain a traumatic pneumothorax you will in fact be _dead_ and that just isn’t in my job description.”

“Claire,” Matt starts, and she jabs him in the shoulder.

“No way,” she says. “No way you can’t, I don’t know, text like a normal person? ‘Hey, Claire, just dropping by, not stabbed! No need to worry! Also, I didn’t die!’ Which isn’t a normal person thing, but whatever! I’m willing to give you that, because you’re an idiot, but also you’re an idiot who looks _really good_ shirtless, and also, you can stop me any time, seriously, by telling me why you’re _actually_ here. Throw a girl a bone, God.”

“I—” Matt begins. _I missed you, I wanted to see how you were doing, I was afraid_ : none of these are false, but none of them are precisely true either, in the way that lies by omission so often are. In the end, he says the only thing he can, which is what he’s always meant, regardless of the word’s he’s used: “I need you,” he says, and it’s terrible in its starkness and its honesty and its scope. Matt’s aware that one day, he’s going to throw himself at a bullet that he can’t dodge, and it will fail to avoid his vital organs, and one of those will be Claire, and another will be Foggy, and Karen, and anyone who has ever cared about him, against reason and rationality. Matt’s tried to give up these things, to make himself as little of a liability as possible, but in the end he is just too hungry, too touch-starved, too willing to expand his blast radius beyond himself, and to those he indulges himself by loving.

Claire is one of the best people Matt knows. She’s petty, and she’s selfish in a very specific way that is born out of love, and she’s unfailingly, unflinchingly good, and unwaveringly strong. She navigates the fractured boundaries of _good_ and _right_ by intuition. Where Matt puts on a costume for the day and another for the night, she wears her own face with courage and honesty and a forthrightness he can only aspire to in the way that he aspires to goodness: with resignation and longing and, if he’s being honest, a little envy.

Because Matt knows this, he knows that she would not hesitate to close the window, to draw the curtains and deny him at the threshold, and so when she sighs, he takes it as the gift that it is. “You may as well come in,” Claire says. “No point standing there all night.”

He clambers through the window, as lightly as possible, and takes a moment to get his bearings. The carpet is new — less bloodstained, he thinks wryly — and she stands by the window, voice tight as if her arms are crossed, and says: “I’m going to need you to qualify that, then.”

“I need—” Matt says, then backtracks: “Do you have any rope, or—”

She breaks into a brief fit of laughter then, incredulous. “Man, this should be good,” she says. “You’re not allowed to interrogate anyone on this roof, okay, we don’t have a handy dumpster this time. Or is it, I don’t know, some sort of—”

“Please,” Matt says, and the tension is back in his shoulders. He flexes his fingers, closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, and none of it helps. “It’s just been a bad day, and I — I don’t know, Claire — I just.” He tries to find words, and fails, and says instead, far more brusquely than he would like: “I need something to do. Just something simple, anything, but you have to tell me.”

“Like what?” Claire says. “Do my backlog of dishes? Get all the laundry off that one chair in my room? Hang up my scrubs?” She sounds more confused than incredulous now. “I know your thing is being cryptic, but this is taking that to a whole new level.” Her heartbeat is picking up a little, though, so she has to be picking up on what he’s asking for, at least a little, and Matt shrugs.

“I was hoping for something a little more authoritative,” he admits, voice dropping, and she catches her breath, and there it is. “Please,” he says, terse and tense, and pushes his cowl back, running a rough hand through his hair, and angling his gaze down. Claire makes the sound he associates with that first night, exasperated and exhausted, more forceful than a sigh.

“Fine!” she says. “Fine. Rope. You want rope, I have rope. How about, I don’t know, are handcuffs too run-of-the-mill? Though I guess you’d have gone to a cop for those, or just dropped by the precinct, but what do I know—”

“I trust you,” Matt says, because he does, and he wouldn’t go to someone he didn’t trust for this, even if it’s not something he’s really articulated to himself before now.

“Oh!” Claire says. “Of _course_ , I hadn’t noticed. It’s not like I’ve had your literal life in my hands or anything! Jesus, Matt, just — stay there—” and her footsteps fade a little before she’s back, footsteps a little awkward. When she stops, there’s a thump, and Matt realizes she’s brought a chair. Its legs scuff up the carpet. “Get that off,” she says, tapping his shoulder, and the authority in her voice hits him before her words. He peels off the outer layer of red armor and holds it out to her, and she makes a considering noise. “This too,” she says, plucking at the collar of his undershirt, “but these can stay—” she pokes his hipbone through his compression leggings “—and then wait,” and she’s backing away, armor in hand.

Matt pulls his shirt over his head, and holds it out, feeling oddly posed. A door opens nearby, and he hears Claire hum under her breath as she digs around: the peculiar sound of his armor being set down on a shelf, plasticized and yet pliable, the zip and rustle of a bag, a plastic sheet crinkling, and then silence; the same sounds in reverse, and then her footsteps growing louder. Matt appreciates that she never conceals her movements, but doesn’t particularly telegraph them either. Intentional or not, it’s a type of honesty in its own way.

Claire takes the shirt from him and sets it aside — on a shelf or a table, Matt can’t tell — and puts her hands on his shoulders, pressing down. “Sit,” she says, “and talk me through this.” The chair is metal, cold against Matt’s skin, and she takes him by the wrist, putting a bundle of rope in his hand. It’s nylon, the standard thickness that comes in survival kits, not as soft as it could be, but more than sufficient. “Good?” she asks.

“Good,” he says. “Hands and feet, please — fold the rope in half — now wrap it around, here,” and he indicates his wrists, a foot apart behind his back; she tightens the rope as he directs her, first around his wrists and then around itself, until he tenses against it, and finds it solid. Claire wraps the ends around the legs of the chair then, pulling until he can feel it in his shoulders, and then ties the rope off, letting the knot slip until he’s immobilized, but comfortable. She goes down to her knees to tie his ankles, then, and the brush of the rope across his bare feet is electric, and when she stands again, her pulse has settled into a steady thump. Matt imagines that she can feel it in her throat; if she would let him, he could press his fingers to her neck and feel it.

“You know,” Claire says, “I could get used to this. You’re not actively bleeding, you’re not mouthing off, you’re actually sort of doing what you’re told. Don’t spoil me like this.”

Matt tests the ropes, which are sound inasmuch as any ropes are sound, and Claire must notice the way he flexes his feet and rolls his shoulders, because she says, sharp, “Don’t you dare,” and that’s all it takes: he drops all pretenses and strains against the ropes until his wrists ache, nearly tipping the chair over. “Matt,” Claire says, a warning, and those are her long strides, and that’s her hand in his hair, grip vicious, as she pushes the chair back upright, pulling his head back in the process.

“God,” Matt says, voice constricted, “come on, come _on_ —” and she gives his hair a yank, so hard that tears spring to his eyes.

“No,” she says, and she’s furious in a way that he hasn’t heard in a long time. “No, you don’t get to fucking — you don’t get to just — assume, Matt, you don’t get to trust me like that! I could do serious damage, come on, give me something here. You don’t get to just give yourself away like that, God,” and she’s absolutely livid, because her voice is absolutely steady, pitched low and vehement.

That’s what Matt does, though, because he doesn’t have anything else to give: his love is guarded by design, and his heart is patchwork and insufficient, and his life is already moot. All he has left is his body: his to break, his to throw into harm’s way, his to exhaust for the benefit of those who are intact enough to enjoy it, and now Claire wants him to ask for something that is so integral to him that he can’t even begin to articulate it.

“Please,” he says, instead, and she’s holding herself, back, he can tell. He can hear her hair brush her shoulders when she cocks her head, and he forces the words out, like a confession: “please, Claire, hit me—”

He swears he can hear her eyes rolling, that same shrug of absolute resignation that absolutely lacks surprise as she throws her hands up, but there’s barely a second between that and the impact of her hand on his cheek, open-palmed and stinging. His head snaps to the side, and she pulls him back to face her by his hair, leaning in. “Say it,” she says. Her face is warm, or maybe that’s the flush rising to his cheeks, smarting.

“Thank you,” he says, and he’s settled a little, jarred back into himself, but it still comes out sardonic.

“Not good enough,” Claire says, and backhands him across the other cheek. There’s less force behind the blow — the angle is awkward — but the bones of her knuckles mean that it’s a deeper type of hurt, and she’s breathing fast. “Again,” she says, a little breathy, and he turns his head towards her voice.

“Thank you,” he says, but it’s still not enough; he can tell, though he can’t pick out just what it is — tone, volume: these quantifications are failing him — and she slaps him again, on the same side this time, but open-palmed, before the ache of the previous blow subsides. She doesn’t have to ask him this time. He gasps it out before turning back, and this time her palm feels like a benediction. His eyes are wet, and he squeezes them shut. Claire presses kisses to his forehead and, gently, over his closed eyelids; when she tips his chin up with her fingers and barely breathes over his mouth, he can taste salt.

“Better,” she says, and, because she is a good person: “More?”

Because he is not, Matt says “Please,” and when she obliges, he turns into it, because he needs this, much as he wishes he didn’t. Each time the pain flares up he can forget that for another second and give himself over to being cared for in the only way he can accept.

“Thank you,” he says, over and over, until the words become noise, lost in the rush of blood in his ears. He’s slurring the words by the time Claire stops, pressing her hands to the sides of his face to dull the sting. Her hands are so hot, and her voice so rough, and Matt can hear her heart hammering against her chest, and he can _smell_ her, and he licks his lips and pulls against the ropes this time, not in earnest but to feel it in his shoulders and in the small of his back.

“God,” Claire says, like it’s a revelation, and maybe it is: she’s enjoying this, and Matt gasps at the word and the sound of her voice. “Say something, come on, Matt,” she says, and he does. It’s a litany of _yes_ , and _please_ , and words that aren’t prayers, but have the same tenor of sung psalms, thready and pleading. She strokes his throat as he vocalizes, and smooths her hands over his shoulders; she digs her thumbs into the knots forming at the nape of his neck, and he loses words briefly, reduced to noises he can make without drawing breath: deep in his throat, and visceral and foreign even to himself.

“It’s okay,” Claire says, and he hears her slowly, as if he’s underwater, and it takes a minute for him to realize she’s speaking, let alone decipher words. “It’s okay, Matt, you’re good, you’re so good, God, you look — I mean — you look so _good_ ,” and he breaks the surface then, at the wonder in her voice. “Come on, let’s get these off,” she says, and kneels to undo the knots at his ankles, undoing the rope and rubbing soothing circles around the bone. When she undoes the knots running from his rope cuffs to the chair, she pauses. “Do we want to leave these?” she says, tapping the loops around his wrists.

He finds his voice then, though he doesn’t recognize it at first, to say “Yes, please,” and Claire laughs.

“I was hoping you’d say that,” she says, and gives the ends of the rope one last wrap, tucks them in. “Come on, let’s get you taken care of.”

She leads him to her bedroom with a hand on the small of his back, fingers brushing under the waistband of his leggings every now and then, and he’s suddenly aware of how little they hide, and how he’s pushing back into her touch. “Okay then!” Claire says — delighted? taken aback? both? He can’t tell anymore — “We like that, let’s see what we can do about that.”

Matt’s barely coherent enough to startle when he takes him by the shoulders and walks him backward until he feels the bed behind his knees, and then pushes him down the same way she had on the chair. Claire leaves him there while she opens a drawer — Matt hears the whisper of it as it slides, and hears her heartbeat pick up again — and then she’s back. “Thoughts?” Claire says, and kneels on the bed to place something in his hand. It’s firm to the touch, silicone probably, and Matt traces his fingertips over the swell and curve of it, weighs it in his hand, and nods.

“Please,” he says, before Claire can chide him, and she presses a smile against his shoulder.

“Lie down, then,” she says, “and let’s get these off.” She tugs at his leggings, and Matt lifts his hips for her, fights the urge to turn over and press his face into her sheets. Claire hums in satisfaction, tracing a fingertip lightly under the head of his cock, and he drips onto his stomach, dick twitching, breath caught in his throat as she laughs. “Have you done this before?”

“Yeah,” Matt whispers. “God, please, Claire.”

“Wow,” she says, and runs the flat of her nail up his dick. He whines at that, pulling his shoulders back to keep from squirming. “If I’d known you’d be this responsive, I’d have done this way sooner — except I guess that internal bleeding would have maybe been a problem—”

“Sorry,” Matt says. It’s not the first time he’s said it to her, and it certainly won’t be the last, but he hopes that this will be when she starts to believe him. “I’m sorry.”

“I bet you say that to all the girls who tie you up,” Claire says, and he can’t help laughing at that.

“Just you,” he says. “Just you.”

He can’t tell if her pulse speeds up because of the apology or the admission. “I’ll hold you to that,” she says, and slides a hand under the small of his back, helping him sit up. “On your knees, come on.” Matt gets his legs under himself, awkwardly, and she steps away. There’s the rustle of straps and buckles clicking, and when she turns her walk is different, feet set a little wider, leading from her hips and not her chest. “Come up here,” she says, weight settling onto the bed, and Matt does, shuffles forward until she pulls him by the hips to where she’s sitting up, leaning against the creak of a headboard.

Claire thumbs over the head of his cock — “Easy,” she says, “easy,” as if she’s gentling him — and strokes him until his hips are twitching, and then she rubs a slick fingertip over his hole, teasingly light, until he’s gasping. “Easy,” she says again, and presses until she’s rubbing inside him, incrementally until he’s rocking back into it, as much as she’ll let him.

When she presses a second finger into him, he gasps her name, and she just laughs and rubs circles into his hip, pushes with her fingertips and works him open so slow and so good. She’s so wet-hot just under his hips; he can smell the former and feel the latter, and with her fingers inside of him he feels full up with her already.

“Please,” he says, “Please, Claire, come on, come _on_.”

“Pushy,” she says, and clicks her tongue, but she flexes her fingers one last time and slides them out, down the back of his thigh — slippery and warm — and takes a tighter grip on his hip. “I’ve got you,” she says, and slides the head of her cock through the slick until it’s just pressing at him. “In your own time.”

It’s been a while, and it’s a lot — Matt lets his mouth fall open, gasps every time he rocks down a little further — and Claire has a bruising grip on his hips now, nails digging in. She gasps when he pushes back, and steadies him; he wishes he could touch her, trace the slope of her breasts or the curve of her lips, but his hands are still tied, and he’s relying on her to keep him upright and where he needs to be. He’s forgotten how good it is, this blunt press and stretch, and by the time he’s pressed flush against her he’s almost forgotten to breathe. When Claire rocks her hips experimentally, he takes a great gulping breath and almost chokes on it.

“Yeah,” Claire says, “that’s it, come on,” and he rises up an inch, pushes back down and feels as if the breath has been knocked out of him all over again. “Look at you, you’re so good for me, come on—“ and he does it again, a little further this time, falling into the rhythm of her heart the way he always has “—God, yeah.”

Her cock is wet, and he lets her push him back to lean on her pulled-up knees, and that’s so good — the growing ache in his shoulders, her fingers on his hips — that he whines, and rolls his hips in tiny, tiny movements against hers, and comes as if it’s been knocked out of him, a blow that he feels in his ribs and his thighs and that startles him into a sigh.

“Beautiful,” Claire says. “You look beautiful, Matt, now for God’s sake come down here.” She’s dripping on the sheets — they smell different wet, and Matt knows Claire’s smell so well that it’s almost reflexive — and she slips out of him, scrambles to undo the harness so that he can tip forward and press his mouth to her. Her thighs are wet, and he scrapes his teeth along the juncture of the muscles there, and then he licks a broad stroke up to her clit, not teasing anymore.

She sinks her hands into his hair, and holds him in place, rolls her hips up against his face and pulls until she’s smeared slick from his nose to his chin. “Yeah,” she gasps, and makes an impatient noise, and he closes his lips around her clit and presses the flat of his tongue against her and she cries out and gets, impossibly, wetter, shuddering and pulling so hard that he makes a pained noise in his throat until she finally stills, stroking down his aching jaw and across the pulse in his throat.

“Matt,” she says, and then presses her thumb to his lips, lets him lick at it. “I’ve got you, hold on.” She untucks the ends of the rope, then, kneeling by his side, and undoes the coils and coils around his wrist, and rubs at the marks that the rope has left where he’s pulled at it until he turns onto his side and curls up, overwhelmed. “I’ve got you,” she says, and presses kisses to his wrists. She wipes at his mouth, gently, and his stomach, with something that definitely feels like one of her shirts, and curls around him, pulling up half of the sheet to cover them, and smiles against the nape of his neck, again.

“Was I—” Matt says, and pauses, not sure how to finish his question: not sure of the words, and not sure of the answer.

Her heart rate picks up. Claire’s not given to letting him off easy, but this time, she says: “You were so good, Matt, so good for me,” and the drop is over: he’s on solid ground, once again, her heartbeat steady against his back, and he lets himself be held, and he lets himself be praised, and feels solid and unutterably whole as his pulse shifts to match hers. “You were perfect,” Claire whispers.

He lets himself believe it.


End file.
